Salt of the earth: Araya on DVD

Margot Benacerraf, now in her 80s, only ever made one feature-length film, but that film remains so extraordinary, so very nearly singular, that it merits an admiration on par with many more prolific and esteemed bodies of work. After studying and gathering numerous influential allies in France and elsewhere, Benacerraf returned to her native Venezuela, specifically to an island no one had heard of, though when discovered by the Spanish 450 years earlier it was deemed a sort of paradise on account of its abundance of one resource: salt, as valuable back then as gold. We can see the ruins of colonial fortresses erected to protect the island and its salt marshes, once the center of piracy in the Caribbean, during the prologue of Araya (1959). But historical context quickly gives way to the seeming timelessness of hard labour, to Benacerraf’s lyrical approach to depicting the life of a community that was, at the time, so isolated as to resemble some primordial dream. Araya is now available on DVD from Milestone, the latest lost masterpiece resurrected by the same beloved company that re-released Killer of Sheep (1977) and The Exiles (1961).

Part ethnographic study, part homage to the workers of the developing world, part tone-poem with traces of artifice or subtle exaggeration lining its documentary foundations, Araya mainly recalls antecedents that can only be labeled documentaries in the vaguest sense: Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (1933), the midpoint fishing sequence from Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), or Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955). Araya’s astounding images reveal a closed world formed of sand, sea, sun and salt, and not much else. Each of its inhabitants works in some capacity related to the salt industry. Long lines of shirtless men carry brimming baskets on their heads to add to immense pyramids of salt. Men break down mounds of salt with sticks in unison, women preserve fish in salt, children sift salt. The arrival of the water truck is a major event in this place where it never rains and there are no springs or lakes, where some of the older women’s faces are so dry with salt and sun that appear almost mummified. An especially memorable face belongs to a cigar-chomping old woman who walks into a cemetery with her granddaughter, where in lieu of flowers graves are adorned with shells. Araya’s narration (there are two voice-over tracks on Milestone’s disc, one Spanish, one French, both with English subtitles) strains to remind us that these people do nothing other than work, sleep and eat.

Nothing grows here; all life comes from the sea; life is work and work only: Araya’s narration conveys a number of immensely interesting facts, but it's also mercilessly repetitive, focuses on certain individuals without allowing them to reveal much in the way of individual personalities, and gradually becomes a major distraction. You begin to wonder if the narration is really needed at all. One could argue that it keeps you from paying as close attention as you might otherwise, that it stifles discovery. Surely the images and diegetic sounds, including those strange, haunting work songs, are more than enough to at once captivate and inform us, right up to the film’s elegantly portentous closing scenes, in which the island’s process of extraction, unchanged for centuries, is on the verge of massive change with the approach of modern industry. Let's be clear: Araya is a masterpiece. I urge you to see it. I just wish that Benacerraf’s incredible assembly of sights and sounds were allowed to speak for itself.

Bitter harvest: White Material on DVD

Dogs cross a dirt road under headlights. A flashlight searches an abandoned house to find a man in military garb, a hole in his belly, lying wide-eyed and dead on a bed. Somewhere smoke roils through darkness and flames lap at a building. A woman climbs aboard a crowded bus, the sole white face among her fellow passengers (and how white it is, sprayed with freckles, looking papery-fragile against the red dirt and harsh sun). A peculiar flashback structure reveals itself, the first 15 minutes of White Material (2009) functioning as a vestibule, along which fragmentary scenes are arranged in a seductively disorienting manner, their cryptic fluidity heightened by Tindersticks’ prowling lighthouse beam of a score. Yet everything key to the narrative has been planted herein and will unfurl and amass volume from here on, honed by actions whose savagery cannot be softened by the narcotic lyricism of their delivery.

New from Criterion, White Material is Claire Denis’ third feature depicting whites in Africa, following her autobiographical debut Chocolat (1988), and her inspired transposition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd into contemporary Djibouti in Beau Travail (1999). Co-written with novelist Marie NDiaye, the film centers on Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), foreman of a coffee plantation in an unnamed country increasingly consumed by revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) violence. Maria was to inherit the plantation from her ex-father-in-law (Michel Subor): she feels she belongs there, not so much entitled as embedded. When government emissaries urge her to depart (a helicopter even passes over at one point, commanding evacuation through a megaphone, raining down survival kits), Maria chooses to ignore them, staying focused on the harvest, for which she needs to rally a new group of labourers after their predecessors hastily quit: like the servants in The Exterminating Angel (1962), the staff knows it’s time to split long before the bosses. We see her speak to her black neighbours and employees as equals, blind to the fact that in their eyes the new crisis has reduced Maria to “white material,” just another vestige of the colonial past, less person than troublesome anachronism, a kind of ghost. The era that facilitated her forging a life here is rapidly closing, if not already long-gone with the wind, though Maria’s similarity to Scarlett O’Hara ends with her fierce tenacity. It’s the quality that defines her, and when it finally breaks nearly the film’s very end, it causes a violence to erupt within Maria that’s the stuff of Greek tragedy.

In keeping with its geographical ambiguity (the film was shot in Cameroon, but could be numerous places in French West Africa), White Material’s overt political scenario is largely peripheral to the main action: the child soldiers swarming the countryside, the pro-insurgent DJ narrating the rebels’ advance over the airwaves like Supersoul in Vanishing Point (1971), and, though based on Thomas Sankara, the film’s rebel leader, known only as the Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé), remains a mysterious, iconic figure throughout, though, in a wonderful detail, we glimpse a tattoo on his arm that reads “Jamais K.O.” or “never knocked-out,” which seems bitterly ironic until Denis’ eloquent final image implicitly applies this bit of bravado to the spirit of Boxer’s cause, rather than his mere mortal existence. (An amusing coincidence: the name of Bankolé’s character is echoed in the matchboxes Bankolé’s nameless protagonist collects in The Limits of Control, released the same year.) But White Material’s internal politics play out vividly in the stray destinies of the Vial family. Maria’s ex-husband André (Christophe Lambert, his voice reduced to a Gallic growl since his Highlander days) has married and had a child with a black woman and lives in a house right next to Maria’s. He’s now selling off the plantation behind Maria’s back to pay off his debts. Maria and André’s son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) meanwhile has grown into a lazy, aimless young man, born and raised in Africa but an outsider nonetheless, who suddenly finds a dubious sense of purpose by identifying with the child soldiers, disposing of his blonde hair, and attempting to position himself as their prospective leader by gleefully and recklessly bribing them with goods. As with Maria’s final wrathful act, something about Manuel’s transformation feels a little more symbolic than real: our agrarian heroine’s offspring is but a different sort of bad yield. Yet I can’t honestly say that these initially jarring, metaphorically-minded dramatic shifts spoil anything essential in my deep engagement with White Material, partly because the performances of Huppert and Duvauchelle are so superb, and partly because their actions do finally feel of-a-piece in this unforgettable work from one of our greatest directors, who, as always, rigorously follows her own elliptical, idiosyncratic muse.

Of Gods and Men: the limits of brotherly love

We know that Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prize-winner Of Gods and Men was drawn from the 1996 incident in which seven Tibhirine Trappist monks were kidnapped and eventually beheaded during the Algerian Civil War, the exact circumstances of their slaughter a matter of controversy and contention to this day. So we might expect something draped in dread to unfold here, a drama whose hopeless fluctuations amount to nothing more than a death march. But inevitability is a force one strives to come to terms with when one’s life is devoted to worship and public service. That things are bound to end poorly becomes a matter of secondary importance once Beauvois and his collaborators usher us into this realm of carefully nurtured quietude, where disparate, overwhelming inner struggles are conducted and resolve terribly hard-won, where fraternal bonds are largely strengthened as much through disagreement and prolonged panic as they are through a sense of harmony and shared ideals. This is indeed a meditative movie (how could it be otherwise?), yet also at times a joyous one, one that reminds us of several important things: that running away only brings new things to run from; that need, vocation, and genuine communion transcends the confines of dogma; and that god (or God), whether regarded as a concept or a true presence, is only alive when his followers engage fully with the world in all its disorder.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, and photographed with a loving (and necessary) bias toward natural light by Caroline Champetier, Of Gods and Men pulls us in by immersing us in the monks’ daily activities, especially those of the abbot Christian (Lambert Wilson), an Islamic scholar who has the magnificent nerve to quote the Koran to Muslim terrorists threatening his life, and Luc (Michael Lonsdale), a trained physician who administers humble remedies (not to mention shoes) to the local, largely impoverished Algerian population. As the threat of uprising prompts government officials to plead with that monks to flee and the townsfolk to plead for their steadfastness, each of the monks are forced to make their cases for staying or going, the disagreements causing considerable tension that seems only to abate when the group joins in song, their roster of Gregorian chants emerging as one of the film’s most fortifying refrains, the other being Beauvois’ dogged use of lingering close-ups to glean some sense of the monks’ individual inner turmoil, which emerges as diverse and resonant. Luc, who is not the eldest among the monks but whose health is poor, seems to be the only one who knows from the start what his choice is. “I’m not scared of death,” he says. “I’m a free man.”

It’s serendipitous that Of Gods and Men should arrive in theatres while Claire Denis’ White Material still lingers in the memories of many moviegoers (at least in the US; here in Canada the film has yet to enjoy a well-deserved release). Both concern the legacy of French colonialism as it effects those attempting to make a life for themselves in those countries afflicted, but the contrast is fascinating. Denis’ mise en scène is narcotic in its way, but also secular, dark, fierce and brutal, where Beauvois’ approach centers on the serene and a universal, non-denominational sense of religious feeling, even when the grotesque looms just outside the monastery gates. It’s a gift to have both these visions circulating through our collective consciousness, helping us to reflect on the complexity of global ruptures, and those ghosts from the past that continue to haunt us.

The Eagle: Fatherless son searches for a standard in a savage land

The expository titles that open The Eagle emerge from a haze of computerized mist, a figurative fog that envelops the ancient history about to be conjectured upon. Inspired by the legend of the Ninth Spanish Legion, the words tell of how in 120 A.D. 5000 Roman soldiers journeyed into uncharted Northern Britain and vanished without a trace, along with their beloved standard, a silver eagle whose loss seems to have grieved Rome far more than that of its troops. But our story really begins 30 years later, with the arrival of centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) at a remote, dilapidated garrison not far from the dreaded northern frontier. It seems an undesirable post, but Marcus Aquila has his reasons for being there: his father led the aforementioned ill-fated, now infamous, expedition.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, The Eagle may be set in Roman-occupied Britain, but its trajectory most closely resembles that of a revisionist Western, with its hero, devoted to his flag yet fundamentally an individualist of stoic integrity, traversing hostile terrain rife with primitive yet fierce aboriginal warriors in the name of some grandiose colonialist project. After an act of bravery lands Marcus Aquila a damaged knee, a medal and an honorable discharge, he hears rumours of recent Eagle sightings up in the Highlands and vows to retrieve it, with only Esca (Jamie Bell), his noble native slave, as companion and guide. So this lone ranger and his Tonto go behind enemy lines, off the map, and into the vastness of Scotland’s murky glens on what is surely a pointless quest, a journey into the heart of darkness for a hunk of metal, not even a person, though perhaps the real goal is to apprehend some obscure truth about a long-lost father and vindicate his tarnished legacy.

Reuniting Last King of Scotland director Kevin MacDonald, scripter Jeremy Brock, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, The Eagle is transporting and richly atmospheric, pulling you in on the strength of its storytelling and gorgeously rugged images, some illuminated only by flickering candles. A moonlight fight is more brutal for its gloom, as is the vision of barbecued invaders resembling rabid hippies and fighting like wild dogs, crazed with the rage of the colonized. Later on the Pict tribes are introduced, the tables turned, Marcus Aquila becomes the slave, and there’s something transfixing in seeing this hulking hero kneel before lanky warriors who decorate themselves so as to look like they literally emerged from the surrounding stone, cold sea and hardscrabble. MacDonald refrains from any fashionable indulgence in gore, but reveals a deft understanding as to how to cultivate our anticipation of violence with close-ups of sharpened spikes spinning on the sides of cartwheels, or a knife about to plunge into a knee to perform surgery without anesthetic.

Brock’s dialogue however is often dry or simply too on the nose. Donald Sutherland turns up for a nice supporting bit, and there’s a scene where he provides amusingly colourless colour commentary to the coliseum fight that introduces Esca: “Look at that. Look at that!” But what’s spoken in The Eagle is secondary to what transpires, and the story itself is fascinating. At least for the first two-thirds. The film’s last act is disappointingly stupid, though in hindsight isn’t hard to see coming. I suppose says something about how all of us, oppressed and oppressors both, are capable of heinous acts and old soldiers never lose their fire. If only the story didn’t reward its genocidal Romans by feeding their vanity and idolatry. You can’t help but imagine the alternate version where Marcus Aquila finds the lost eagle but it’s been consigned to life as a rusty anvil or paperweight, or collecting dust in some closet where later humans will store forgotten bowling trophies and unwanted crock pots.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars on blu-ray: Lonely planet made less so by monkey, alien miner, sense of wonder

There exists in so much science fiction a fantasy of heroic, ennobling loneliness, of entire planets available just for you to explore, or perhaps for you and an unobtrusive little companion, a robot, say, or a primate. Special effects pioneer-turned-director Byron Haskin’s wonderfully imaginative Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) begins with US astronaut Commander “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee) crashes on the red planet. It proves just barely inhabitable, a world of desert canyons and columns of flame, like Death Valley meets Kuwait after the first Gulf War. Draper has lost his one and only shipmate, Colonel Dan (Adam West, a couple of years shy of Bat-fame), who it seems to me may have quite possibly also been his secret lover, and from whom he’s inherited Mona, a feisty little monkey in an orange space suit who does all sorts of very funny little monkey things but is clearly no replacement for a buddy, colleague, or boyfriend. Fortunately, Draper is fit, resourceful, endlessly curious, and, most of all, lucky.

Fascination with Mars overpowers grief or despair, its glowing, oxygen-rich rocks like hot potatoes, its subterranean deposits of pastel-coloured stuff, its peculiar vegetation, which Draper consumes and gradually converts into very silly-looking tunics and Robin Hood hats, and most of all its gorgeous landscapes that expand and undulate, traversed by balls of fire that meander the terrain like wandering bison. Early on we’re offered a rather long sequence during which Draper silently makes his first baffling geological discoveries. There is then a subsequent scene where Draper simply describes all of them into his recording device. The movie takes its sweet time, it’s true, but it’s never hard to watch, being so vibrantly visualized and so dramatically scored by Van Cleave, whose themes reminds me of some of the music Howard Shore’s composed for David Cronenberg. If you happened to have sees Cast Away (2000) you might recall that the best parts of the movie by far were just Tom Hanks wordlessly negotiating his survival on the desert isle. There’s a somewhat similar dynamic at work here, a focus on tasks, labour, and reward. Long stretches of the movie resemble a fake documentary, an episode of Intergalactic Geographic, if you will, yet with enough time Draper will inevitably discover that he’s not alone, that like Daniel Defoe’s hero he gets his own Friday (Victor Lundin), an alien who looks a lot like an ancient Egyptian with immaculate grooming, and whose language sounds not unlike Nahuatl. However, like the archetypically asinine American abroad, as soon as Draper learns that Friday can talk he immediately assumes his new friend will have to learn English.

There’s a wealth of future-retro imagery to enjoy here—the tape decks, pulsating radar, and buttons like Starburst candies—but the aesthetic of Robinson Crusoe on Mars is far too magnificently realized to be reduced to kitsch, and its science is actually remarkably sound given what we knew about Mars at the time, and some of Draper’s equipment, such as his portable video camera unit, are positively prescient. The special effects are fluid and striking, like those mining ships that appear in the Martian sky with unnerving swiftness, though they look an awful lot like the terrifying Martian ships that arrived to slaughter the citizens of Earth in Haskin’s earlier War of the Worlds (53). Not least among the movie’s most impressive elements are its sounds, such as that of Draper’s ship rocketing through space at unfathomable speed in the very first scene. It’s reason alone to seek out the movie on Criterion’s brand-new blu-ray edition, along with its terrific documentary explaining the movie’s relative scientific verisimilitude, and a cute music video for a song about the movie composed and performed by Lundin, whose lyrics imply that maybe he really wanted to play the lead.

It's no fun being an illegal alien—or changing into one: District 9

Not invaders so much as castaways, the aliens wash up over Johannesburg, their great ship looming, suspended and ominously silent for a long while until we humans finally break in and discover the lot of them ailing and with no place to go. More than two decades later the aliens have become the new gypsies, a nationless people unwanted, feared, segregated, blamed for all sorts of things. They’re already loosely confined to zone, but our story begins proper when a private multinational is hired to round them all up and send them to a more remote colony, out of sight, out of mind, herded into the ghetto.

District 9 takes a rather visionary approach to our anxious dreams of extraterrestrial first contact, picking up cues from a lot of great science fiction prose, the sort that rarely gets made into movies. (It’s also entirely possible that parts of its story were inspired by Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film The Defiant Ones.) By rendering the aliens as ostracized refugees in South Africa the film opens the doors wide to invite all manner of metaphorical interpretation, grounding its narrative in the landscape of apartheid and having human characters of all racial backgrounds disparage their visitors with reactionary, colonialist rhetoric, their intolerance made ostensibly acceptable by the humanoid yet crustacean-like aliens’ all too evident Otherness. But this remarkable feature debut from South African-Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, made under the auspices of producer Peter Jackson, also functions quite nicely as engrossing comic book stuff. In fact, the deeper it ventures into pulp territory the better it gets.

Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our unlikely protagonist, a naïve, clownish, moustached bureaucrat who earns his high profile position of supervising the relocation project through pure nepotism. He’s a Kafkaesque tragic character in more ways than one, having first been ill-prepared for a mission fraught with issues of miscommunication and conflicting agendas, and then coming into contact with an alien fluid that infects him with some mysterious gene-altering virus. Wikus could never be mistaken for a hero—it’s only his process of transfiguration, and his sudden value to military strategists, that forces him to become heroic. He gets lucky, and his sheer will to survive is strong. He becomes an unwitting symbol for the possibility of racial conciliation, and embarks on a bloody adventure that slowly turns desperate self-interest into something far grander.

District 9 is wildly ambitious. By its brilliantly realized finale these ambitions are surprisingly fulfilled. Its difficulties arise mostly through a sense of uncertainty with form. Of the more mature filmmakers one might imagine taking on such a project—Paul Verhoven or David Cronenberg spring to mind—I can’t think of any who would have stuck with the limiting faux documentary approach developed by Blomkamp and his co-scenarist Terri Tatchell, which simply causes a lot of unnecessary problems. Opening with the news show style commentaries and character introductions offers the filmmakers a perfectly legitimate—if rather generic—opportunity to get a lot of exposition out of the way. But they continue to try and convince us that we’re watching a kind of documentary long afterwards, and it’s only when the form’s limitations become too constraining—we eventually need to see characters in situations that no diegetically-placed camera could possibly capture—that the film starts breaking its own rules and things get confused. With its handheld, vérité aesthetic, the faux doc format allows filmmakers to cheat certain things that a more classical approach is less forgiving of, but Blomkamp hardly seems like he’s trying to make The Blair Witch Project—on the contrary, he seems a skilled craftsman, so I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t go al the way and embrace the aesthetic demands of an unmistakably fiction film when his story started begging for it.

So District 9 gets off to a wobbly, distracting start, but rest assured it will more than make up for it, partially just because the story is so well-structured and the political—at times outright satirical—undercurrents so rich. Copley compliments this by hurling himself into the squirm-inducing physicality of the role and surrendering completely to the risky notion of the totally bumbling protagonist. Wikus is definitely not cut from the Cronenbergian model of the reflective hero fascinated by his own terrifying metamorphosis. The guy is really an idiot, and through it serves the drama effectively the meager redemption he finds is hard-won. This is what makes this sort of story work, the understanding that heroism is always a balance of character and circumstance, and once in while the latter grossly outweighs the former. In any case, it’s a must-see for anyone with even the slightest appetite for smart spectacle. It sure beats the hell out of the rest of the current summer stock.

Devotion to the sacred Heart of Darkness: novelist Albert Sánchez Piñol journeys back 100 years to reawaken the mystery of the world

Steamship routes circa 1900

The artwork that envelops Penguin Canada’s recent editions of Cold Skin ($18) and Pandora in the Congo ($18) feature spare images that represent distinctive, exotic locations, a lighthouse overlooking a seductively gloomy sea of mist in the first, the talon-like roots of some massive tropical tree in the second. The images loom over the titles, and are cradled in darkness. I wanted to applaud Daniel Cullen’s cover designs because they immediately made me intrigued by this pair of novels from an author I hadn’t heard of, and, most importantly, they did so by evoking something extremely rare in contemporary fiction, promising stories of places in the world still shrouded in shadow, of mysteries lingering within under-explored and little understood landscapes. Which is precisely what these wonderful new books offer us.

Albert Sánchez Piñol

Translated by Cheryl Leah Morgan and now available to English-language readers, Cold Skin, originally published in 2002, and Pandora in the Congo, originally published in 2005, are the first works of Catalan author Albert Sánchez Piñol, a former anthropologist whose fecund imagination feeds upon models from what feels like a very long century ago. Yet somehow his stories read not in slightest like the sort of postmodern pastiche common to other recent incorporations of genre into literary fiction. He’s not subverting older narrative forms so much as shaking them back to life and imbuing them with significance for a new, smaller world. These are serious novels of adventure and strangeness, written with a serious focus on deeply engaging plotting and precise description, and on rendering the fantastical as something chillingly real. The stories, unsurprisingly, are set in the same time period as the sort of popular novels they recall, those of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad especially. To remind us how mysterious our world can be, how conducive to wild imaginings, Sánchez Piñol takes us back to a moment when even the most technologically advanced and powerful societies were not so confident, and certainly not so convincing, in their claims as to what the rest of the world is made of. I ate it up like candy. Except this candy is nutritious!—it entertains the hell out of you, but also resonates intensely with the frailties of the human psyche and the ongoing precariousness of colonial pursuits.

“We are never very far from those we hate. For this very reason, we shall never be truly close to those we love.” As Cold Skin begins its nameless narrator is about to arrive on the small Antarctic isle where the rest of the novel will take place. He has taken the job of weather observer and is contracted for one year. The rhythms are incantory, guiding us ominously in toward our destination, imparting upon us in just a handful of words great distance and time and arduous travel. “We had our first sighting of the island at dawn. It had been thirty-three days since the dolphins fell away sternward and nineteen since the crew’s breath first expelled clouds of vapour.” The narrator is accompanied by the ship’s captain and some crewmembers to carry his year’s worth of food and books to his new abode. They encounter the only other man on the island, the lighthouse keeper, but he behaves strangely and may have gone insane. Nevertheless the ship needs to continue on its route and leaves the narrator there.

Cold Skin is a short novel, and things get weird fast. The narrator discovers the terrible secret of this lonesome place: a race of amphibious creatures who attack only at night. He’s soon forced to make an uneasy alliance with the lighthouse keeper in order to fend off the creatures. The lighthouse keeper holds one of the creatures captive, a female, whose eerie allure gives the novel its title. Bestiality becomes familiar in this uncivilized place, and jealousy and desire rise up out of the murk. I won’t tell you just where this all goes, though its image-vocabulary, themes and motifs are rich enough to spill over into Sánchez Piñol’s follow-up.

Pandora in the Congo is twice as long as Cold Skin, and while it departs from its predecessor’s lean, claustrophobic approach, it is in many ways more ambitious while still focusing on young, ostensibly pacifist heroes with few attachments—orphans of one sort or another—and adventures in hostile places that engender unsustainable or unattainable strange love. As the First World War looms, Londoner Tommy Thomson makes his first forays into a literary career, albeit of a not very distinguished sort. He becomes a ghostwriter for a crude, racist old bastard, more a brand name than a legitimate author. He makes a pittance and works like a slave to crank out pre-plotted pulp tales of heroic Europeans in savage lands. But a series of coincidental deaths lead Tommy to realize that there are is in fact a longer chain of would-be ghostwriters than he thought, and that he, being the final link, is simply the most deftly exploited: the ghostwriter’s ghostwriter’s ghostwriter’s ghostwriter. He then takes another, seemingly more noble ghostwriting gig, working for a barrister who represents a man accused of double homicide while working as a cook for two aristocratic brothers exploring the Congo with a team of black African slaves who do all the heavy lifting and then some. He’s to interview the accused and novelize his story, the idea being that by making his Congolese adventure into something compelling and sympathetic the barrister will go to trail with the public on the side of his client. It’s in doing these interviews that Tommy’s adventure really begins, though it is very much a kind of adventure by proxy.

Tommy narrates Pandora in the Congo from a perspective of 60 years, though Sánchez Piñol is careful to minimize the editorializing of hindsight, letting us develop our own understanding of how the novel’s complex webs of treachery speak to the modern world. There are exceptions of course, but I’d argue that they enlighten us more than they condescend: “active collaboration in evil was a matter of a concession as simple as holding out your hand… that hand was the essence of the twentieth century.” Culpability is endlessly ambiguous here. Tommy writes hateful trash, but he does so only because he’s employed by the trash’s true author. He later writes a great adventure novel that he only hopes is in the service of a good cause, but he could just as easily be completely deceived. The man whose story Tommy writes—the man has the curious name of Marcus Garvey—commits horrific acts while journeying through the Congo, but he does so under strict orders from the men who employ him. Such moral quandaries only balloon as the plots continues to take its marvelous twists.

Illustration from H.M. Stanley's In Darkest Africa (1890)

Besides the rich white Europeans and poor white Europeans, besides the black slaves being worked to death and the black slaves employed to help exploit their own kind, there is an additional people roped into Tommy’s narrative, an underground race of humanoids who, like the creatures in Cold Skin, quickly become the Other for which violence and domination are deemed the only appropriate response. As in Cold Skin, a female from this race becomes the centre point of a battle between various male desires, including that of our narrator. The novel’s narrative threads are laid out with the caveat that nearly all of them are relayed by someone other than the writer of the words we read. They are interpreted, digested, possibly tainted, possibly lies. Our narrator seems himself to be reliable, but he can only narrate what he’s told. In the end we’re overwhelmed by the impossibility of stories being the creations of a single author, and here is where he catch a glimpse of the philosophy of Sánchez Piñol himself, who openly employs the styles and trajectories of the novels he’s presumably admired. Let’s not get too concerned with tracing or judging the indefinable labyrinth of sources for our tales, Pandora in the Congo implies, but rather surrender to the conviction of the telling we’re given. It may be the only lasting consolation.

The long goodbye: pop culture collage + politics + genre deconstruction + divorce = Made in USA

When Paula Nelson wakes in her dormatorial hotel room in some place called Atlantic-Cité she finds at her door a dwarf with high blood pressure who knows her from some shady dealings in their past. Their arrivals here, it would seem, were prompted by the same thing, the suspicious death of one Richard Politzer. But before their relations become unduly friendly Paula beats the dwarf unconscious with a lovely shoe—a blue one, as requested by the dwarf—and the talismanic appearance of his blood becomes Paula’s entrance into an adventure where reality and fiction blur. She soon meets the dwarf’s nephew, a novelist named David Goodis, and his companion, who sings folk songs in the bathroom and whose last name in Mizoguchi. Soon she’ll meet a sinister young man named Donald Siegel and a police inspector named Aldrich. She’ll visit a bar where a very young Marianne Faithful sings ‘As Tears Go By’ a cappella, and a spa where Daisy Kenyon and Ruby Gentry are being paged. As she sinks deeper into mystery she’ll be directed to streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht.

If any of this means anything to you, you probably cherish classical Hollywood, the Japanese masters, detective fiction, or the rich cultural palate of the hip 1960s in general. (You’ll also note that the picture is affectionately dedicated to directors Nicolas Ray and Sam Fuller.) The ravenously referential postmodernism of Made in USA (1966) offers a superb example of what once tied Jean-Luc Godard to his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan especially. Though where Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ spun out for nearly 12 minutes on a effervescent wave of irresistible border town melodics and expressive guitar figures, Godard’s long-lost feature is a less inviting, more difficult mélange of imagery, homage and intertext. Made in USA came at the end of a frenetic creative period launched explosively with Breathless (60). Godard had already divorced Anna Karina, and Paula Nelson would be her final role for him. He was becoming increasingly politicized and this would be described as his final attempt at a genre picture. But Made in USA is only a thriller in the most notional sense. So unconcerned with thrills, its shot mainly in front of nondescript walls, and its violence is rendered quite literally as cartoons.

The script was based, though uncredited upon its original release, on Richard Stark’s terse crime novel The Jugger (65). But Godard, never very interested in conventional narrative models at the best of times, giddily changed the gender of its protagonist and took from his source material only the most skeletal framework—though when you think about it Made in USA is only a marginally more liberal adaptation of Stark than the haunted, dreamlike and lyrical Point Blank (67), vaguely based on The Hunter (62). Fact is that the Stark novels featured an antihero from another time, where these films are so very much products of the 1960s. Among the virtues of Godard’s film is its value as an artifact that speaks to the present. The dead Politzer, whose strident political provocations are heard via a cache of tape recordings, was a communist still intensely bitter about recent French colonial misadventures and newly enraged by Vietnam. Godard’s dream of cinema as a progressive art form is conveyed most openly by the unapologetic, sometimes absurd merging of politics and pop culture, revolutionary esprit in creative life being aligned with like struggle in the war of ideas and policy. So in this sense the title of the film is almost a joke, a punk rock robbery where the vestiges of Old Hollywood’s glory days and American iconography are lovingly sewn into a quilt, only to be battered and sullied beyond recognition. It makes for dense viewing at times, but the carefully staged chaos can also be exhilarating.

Watching Made in USA is clearly a different experience when the viewer shares a modicum of Godard’s cultural knowledge base. In Criterion’s terrific new DVD of the film they even provide a video essay that functions as a sort of Coles Notes explaining each of the film’s most important references, as well as another featurette rife with insightful comments and helpful history from Godard biographers Colin McCabe and Richard Brody. Yet, rather surprisingly, the context that McCabe and Brody provide us with deepens our ability to read the film’s emotional undercurrents just as much, if not more, than its intellectual ones. As I watched Made in USA I was struck by how strangely touching certain moments seemed. Strange because so much feels cryptic and cool as can be. Yet Karina’s performance, already very fun and seductive—and so well dressed—is imbued with an elegiac weight, which transmits in one melancholically adoring close-up after another. Politzer, after all, was once Paula’s fiancé, and when she first speaks in the film she’s sleepily recalling the time when she was once “the mirror of his desires,” the virtual embodiment of his dreams. Politzer’s voice, it begs mention, was provided by Godard himself. Paula’s interests in investigating his death are too layered to fully comprehend, but on one very direct level she’s come to say goodbye to him, to meditate on the cause they once shared, and this ostensibly cerebral collage piece leaves us with the impression of having watched something once so ambitious and impassioned slowly fade to black, like the horizon vanishing behind Paula as she’s driven away from that place called Atlantic-Cité.

High-minded themes fall disappointingly flat In Delgo... not that anyone noticed

With their natural resources evaporating, the winged Nohrins immigrated to Jhamora, the country long settled by the lizard-like, mystically inclined Lockni, and were initially welcomed warmly. But the Nohrins got greedy and took more than their share and things got ugly, ending only when the Nohrin evil schemer Sedessa was banished to some awful place inhabited by gargoyle-like creatures with digestion problems. All this is relayed in the swiftly paced prelude to Delgo and, though parallels to real life histories of colonialism—including recent misadventures in the Middle East—are admirably conveyed, the deluge of exposition may prove a bit much for the little ones to absorb. Me, I had more trouble keeping the goofy names straight. Who comes up with this stuff?

The exploration of the perils of empire, the inclusion of a character with a gambling addiction, and the forbidden interracial romance that drives the narrative give Delgo some nice, timely shading, but I’m not certain if that all these efforts finally play out to any great effect. The first third intrigues well enough, but once the action starts the character development essentially stops and there’s an awful lot of over-long fights and chases that lack excitement. It doesn’t help that several characters are drearily flat, while potentially more dynamic characters are either shelved early on or suffer deeply uninspired vocal performances from the Freddie Prinze, Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt or especially Chris Kattan, who voices the hero’s grating fop sidekick.

The best thing in Delgo is in fact the worst thing in Delgo, at least in moral terms, which is to say the villain predictably steals the show. Anne Bancroft may have died three and a half years ago, but her sultry voice makes one final and highly pleasurable contribution here as Sedessa, by far the most eroticized creature on display in this otherwise largely neutered fantasy realm. In one scene she slinks about in a crimson, skin-tight, crushed velvet dress and some sort of corset, or at least a push-up bra. In another she dons thigh-high boots and ass-hugging pants. She uses her sexuality to mystify and manipulate those whom she figures can advance her plot to provoke a new war between the Nohrins and Lockni on false terms in yet another unspoken link to the invasion of Iraq. Again, I wonder how much a six-year-old will respond to such undertones, but for parents a little taste of Mrs. Robinson should help to pass the time.

As I post this I've just learned that Delgo now possesses the unhappy distinction of having experienced the worst wide release opening ever, earning only half a million bucks on over 2000 screens on its first weekend. Can't say I was shocked to learn this since I watched it in a theatre with one adults and two kids. It is by no means a great movie of any kind, but it makes you wonder just how hopeless it is trying to put a kid's cartoon out these days that doesn't have the stamp of Disney or one of its imprints on it. 

American history X: Ronald Wright and Paul Auster review the story in progress

A nation is a living thing, and as a living thing—not to mention a thing of tremendous potential for both prosperity and peril—it requires ongoing examination. Definitions of nations are useful, yet they are not fixed, and as the US rapidly builds toward a new opportunity to re-define itself following a tumultuous period simultaneously characterized by unprecedented power and influence and unprecedented international disdain, it’s as good a time as ever to take the long view.

With What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf, $29.95), essayist Ronald Wright, author of Time Among the Maya, Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress, does just that, surveying the trends in defining American life from the arrival of the first Europeans and the gradual crushing of the old Americans by the new. The national character as described in this new book’s pages—one that is forever “losing its innocence” thanks to an unusually strong penchant for historical amnesia—is not very much flattered to say the least, but Wright’s aim is not to pat anyone on the back but rather to flush out the essential, long-circulating venom that plagues the heart of what, like it or not, is our world’s best hope. (Okay, them and, maybe, the European Union, but that would surely call for another book.)

What is America? is, as Wright admits, an eccentric book. As concise in volume as it is expansive in chronology, it spends precious little ink reiterating certain historical events, however enormous in implication, that have been exhaustively dealt with elsewhere. Thus slavery and the Civil War, to name two sweeping examples, are duly accounted for in the book’s thesis but left largely undiscussed in favour of more iconoclastic takes on other, still more unruly histories, such as that of the centuries-in-the-making extermination of Native Americans. Wright emphasizes the fact that it was not simply that white settlers usurped their territory and decimated their rank but that this territory was already being occupied by organized, sophisticated, agrarian peoples—not ranging savages standing in the path of civilization. He does this to make clear just how much the New World was founded upon not just the raw terrain but the time-tested developments of the Old: “The Pilgrims thanked their God for saving them in a ‘wilderness,’ but the feast speaks for itself: turkey, corn, beans, pumpkin, cranberries, potatoes and the rest came from thousands of New World civilization. It was the heathen, not the Lord, who saved them.”

Wright aligns the spin doctoring and self-deceit that facilitated the extermination of the Indians with like contemporary practices, aligning the rhetoric of Andrew Jackson with Ronald Reagan, or that of William McKinley, who needed to consult directly with God in order to allow him to justify invading the Philippines, with George W. Bush. Wright also gives a gracious nod to the work that fellow contemporary writers for laying the groundwork for some of his thesis, such as Jon Krakauer, who’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of violence in Mormonism, is cited in Wright’s exploration of the continuous role of fundamentalist religious thinking, not to mention paranoia, in the development of America’s march toward self-realization.

Yet while its list of dishonorable patriots is impressive, part of What is America? is also given over to paying tribute to the countless voices of intelligent dissent that are equally intrinsic to American identity. Besides Krakauer, Wright also draws upon the barbed lamentations of such luminaries as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Gore Vidal, Davy Crockett, Henry David Thoreau and Alexis de Tocqueville. And were he to take a gander at some of the other titles sharing the new releases section with What is America?, perhaps Wright would go on to include Paul Auster in his list, since Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $26), Auster’s latest novel, is also in a sense a work of American historical revisionism and Auster’s most clearly politically charged work since 1992’s Leviathan.

“I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.” These are the first words of Man in the Dark, which reads as the testimony of a 72-year-old retired book critic named August Brill. The wilderness he writes about is figurative, a vast landscape of relentless shadows, while the literal space he inhabits for the whole of the novel is but the single darkened room where he lies, his leg shattered by an accident, his mind roiling with persistent ghosts, those of his wife, deceased, his son-in-law, separated from his daughter, and his grandson-in-law, killed horrifically on foreign soil. Brill makes up stories to ward off misery, and the one he’s working on as Man in the Dark begins concerns an America embroiled in a new Civil War, one ignited by the corrupt presidential election of 2000.

Stories within stories are the gleaming mulch of Auster’s garden of ideas that deliberately slip away when sifted for singular meanings, but one of the things that I think ennobles Man in the Dark in particular is how boldly it exudes a faith in the redemptive power of storytelling, and how it locates the storytelling capacity in not just writers but in every one of us. The novel lights upon a dizzying catalogue of hot-button issues, from the war in Iraq to the erosion of civil liberties, yet it is the confluence of Brill’s imaginings with the stories he’ll later share with his grieving granddaughter about their family’s past that provides Auster with the meatier political statement, one founded in this crazy notion that a democracy really is meant to empower the individual, and that the access to individual dreams, to the inner lives of others, is the gift that novels give to readers to sustain them through troubled times.

The Furies: not quite as hysterical as the French would have it, but one hell of a sexy, violent, transgressive western melodrama nonetheless

The Furies, one of three westerns directed by Anthony Mann in 1950 following his triumphant string of dazzling noir thrillers, would have to be considered an exceptional movie in any genre. Set in the 1870s, it’s an epic drama about a charismatic, tyrannical widower lording over a vast New Mexico ranch, an impotent son to which he’s indifferent, and a bold, self-determined daughter whose role is uncomfortably close to that of a wife. It’s also a story about deception, sexual dominance and, as the plot would have it, good and bad bookkeeping.

At the film’s dramatic centre is a formidable woman, played by the singular Barbara Stanwyck, grappling fiercely for control of an enormous piece of property and a legacy even larger. Along its periphery are secret love affairs with Mexicans squatters, ghosts of a vanishing frontier, vestiges of colonial chaos, and long-simmering tensions that find release only in unbridled explosions of violence. It’s a marvelous, complex, perverse, horrifying—there are strong does of mutilation and humiliation—and often touching movie that, for all the issues it fails to fully resolve, should be regarded as something very near greatness.

T.C. Jeffords was Walter Huston’s final role. He brings to the aging patriarch an ingratiating blustery swagger that delicately functions as a beard for bone-deep insecurities. Owner of the film’s titular ranch but chronically foolish with money, he’s one three men to be kept, controlled or conquered by his daughter Vance (Stanwyck), the only thing standing between the Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland) family and homelessness, between T.C. and Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), the gambler-turned-banker whose family are the rightful owners of a strip of The Furies and whose father was killed by T.C. long ago. All of these men, in one way or another, are Vance’s lovers. “I’ve always worked my own leather,” boasts Vance, who the adoring T.C. dubs a “she-fox,” who publicly taunts her father’s authority, staking claims on what’s otherwise deemed a man’s domain. When T.C. brings home a woman (a wonderful Judith Anderson) who threatens to replace Vance as matriarch—and true controller—of The Furies, Vance unleashes her wrath, suffers the consequences, and promises to tear everything away from her father.

Among the pleasures of The Furies is watching how Stanwyck and Mann collaborate, resulting in a performance simultaneously seductive and frightening. Locking eyes with each of her male opponents, Stanwyck uses that weirdly amphibian gaze of hers like some Medusa with a perm, and tosses off a peppering of sharpened jabs with her distinctive deadpan. Yet she also conveys such heights of desire and rage, and Mann frames her performance brilliantly in the film’s signature scene of sadistic violence. Mirrors, conventionally symbols of feminine vanity, here become the visual birthplace of female oppression and injury. Stanwyck’s groping for her dead mother’s scissors as her rival gloats before her makes for a majestic moment of unease.

Mann himself, traditionally deemed above all a genre craftsman, has recently been the subject of a call for reconsideration from critics who think he deserves to be elevated to auteur status. (For a strong example, see Richard Combs' piece on Mann in the May/June 2007 issue of Film Comment.) Over the past year or so, without actually trying to, I’ve wound up watching a lot of Mann films—like Raw Deal (48), Border Incident (49), a work that in its way bridges noir and western traditions, and The Naked Spur (53)—and am now more than happy to jump on this critical bandwagon, the latest driver of which is The Criterion Collection, who, with The Furies, now add his name to their list of distinguished featured filmmakers.

I’m sure some readers must wonder why I give so much ink to Criterion releases, but a quick survey of their new package for The Furies pretty much speaks for itself: besides the customarily superb transfer, they offer a beautifully illustrated box, a book featuring a smart essay and archival interview with Mann, DVD supplements like a vintage interview with Huston, a new interview with Mann’s daughter, and a surprisingly good British television interview with Mann from the 60s. And, get this, you also get a handsomely bound paperback edition of Niven Busch’s source novel. They actually give you the damned book!

My favourite extra here though would have to be the audio commentary from historian and western specialist Jim Kitses. I saw him give a talk about Ride the High Country (62) a while back and was deeply impressed by his arguments for ever-closer readings of Sam Peckinpah's work and of westerns as a platform for every conceivable sort of human drama. I also really like his big moustache. Regarding The Furies, he laments the diminished role of Juan and the other Mexicans in Charles Schnee’s adaptation while praising the film’s other transgressive elements, emphasizes the hints of incest between Vance and T.C., directs our attention to the films’ multi-generic threads, and makes a strong case for the western as the genre that best suited Mann’s obsessive interest in familial conflict.